Penblwydd Hapus i Fi - I Think...

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My birthday today - sixty-seven years on this planet, and still nothing makes any sense to a common-sense mind. We have a climate-change forum which the two largest global polluters have decided not to attend - China and Russia: coal & gas interests taking precedence over the planet's good in the pursuit of profit. The West keeps touting the need for strong market ties with China in particular, whilst China strengthens its global nuclear potential by testing stuff that can ultimately be deployed against the very nations to which they are already inextricably bound economically.

Within spitting distance of the climate-change talks in Glasgow is one of the largest methane plumes in the UK - a leaky pipeline just offshore from the talk's venue; apparently these plumes are detectable every four kilometres or so along the pipelines - so basically all over the damn' show. Methane is the largest gaseous contributor to global warming, far and away above carbon dioxide. At the same time we have oil fields and refineries 'flaring' off waste gas from the production of petroleum products, not only wasting the gas itself, but simply polluting the atmosphere to boot.

I watched 'Life at Fifty Degrees' last night and was dismayed that I remember watching programmes on The Open University fifty years ago outlining the problems we were already then facing and pointing to a future that is now our present and will inevitably be our past without us, our species extinct: probably to the planet's benefit. Doing nowt really is not a viable option.

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